It can’t be easy to light up a brand new festival. Why, you’ve got to do a bunch of planning, organize volunteers, negotiate with venues, talk people into doing umpteen different things, write a grant, create a logo, secure a domain name, and then when the day–or month–finally rolls around, you can only cross your fingers and hope that somebody–anybody–is willing to give your goofy idea a shot. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.

The folks that cooked-up this year’s Re:NEW Festival* weren’t mucking about. The festival spans a full month across a dozen different downtown venues, features a slew of staggered events, long-run gallery shows, lamppost banners, glossy printed materials, and of course, printed t-shirts. Oh, yeah–they also decided to stage the North American premier of a world-renowned international recycled art festival/organization, just so you’ll know they aren’t slacking.

From its web site, DRAP-ART is a Barcelona-based “association of artists who have chosen trash to be their material and/or conceptual resource.” Whether you want to call it recycled or repurposed or straight-up trash, (a term DRAP seems to have embraced) the non-standard (typically) mixed media is front-and-center in almost every piece in the show.

Bic pens and piano keys dangle from pendant lamps, a woman’s mod-inspired go-go dress is created with the pop-tops from aluminum cans and sewn with plastic bag “thread”. There are robots made from deconstructed office equipment and a school of tin can-fashioned fish. Phonograph records are laser cut into birds on telephone wires and brown paper bags become the canvas for ashen drawings of industrial Detroit. Bill Miller [the only local in the bunch and one of just two Americans] turns in an incredible wall-sized mosaic/collage of cut linoleum flooring.

Artists do this kind of stuff all the time, but what makes the DRAP-ART show so out-of-this-world is the level of craft and the deep exploration of the various recycled media. In these artists’ hands, the use of the discarded materials is no gimmick, but rather act as really great prompts to build truly extraordinary new and fantastic things.

We could go on, but suffice to say, it’s a fantastic and truly inspirational show that is thoroughly Orbit-approved. To use the hoity-toity argot of art academia, it’s a real sock-knocker-offer. In fact, right after seeing the show we ran out to buy some new socks. It’s that good.

Back to those festival organizers. This blogger knows it must have been a huge undertaking to put on and we have no insight into whether attendance and sponsorship made all that worthwhile. That said, not all successes can be measured with a calculator. So we’d just like say we sure hope this first Re:NEW festival can itself be renewed next–or, at least, some future–year. It’s a great idea for an art festival and Pittsburgh is a great place to host it. We hope the public is enjoying it as much as we are.

The Orbit will even go as far as to suggest a title for the come-back: Re:NEW : Re:DUX. Don’t even say anything. By the time you’re ready, it’ll sound great.

A note: We included way more photos in this piece than we normally do in a post, just because there is so much great stuff we’re excited about**. Even so, this is just a small portion of what’s actually set up, beautifully-presented, and even for sale over at the Wintergarden. The show ain’t over yet, but you need to shake a leg–it ends this Saturday. Get your kiester down there and see it for yourself while you still can.

Re:NEW Festival’s DRAP-ART show is at the PPG Wintergarden (PPG1, downtown), through next Saturday, Oct. 8. Admission is free.

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* A large-scale collaboration between city arts, tourism, downtown, and reuse organizations including the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, Carnegie Museum of Art, Andy Warhol Museum, Visit Pittsburgh, Downtown Pittsburgh Partnership, Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse, Construction Junction, Goodwill, etc.
** And had a hard time not including yet another half dozen photos, but that would just be ridiculous.